Between 485 & 705 SQ/FT Bob Heine's Auto Emporium

[Bob Heine]

Hi Bob,

I'm glad to hear you're finished with the hormone treatments.
And here's hoping the next phase of your recovery goes quicker!


That sounds all too familiar lately...
Was it always like that, or am I just not remembering?
When all our car repairs had to get finished by Monday morning, we just got 'em done!

Hi Rick,

The hormone treatments had the side effect of new and unusual fat deposits. I failed to lose any of the extra weight regardless of how much I cut back portion size or avoided carbs. Once the drugs cleared I started losing weight. Now that I've dropped 30 pounds, Liane is worried I have a new disease.

Although it's supposed to be a chronic condition, my lymphedema has subsided and I finally got some prescription compression stockings. Until I got them, I didn't understand why everyone involved asked if I could put them on by myself. Turns out they do take some effort to put them on. I'm getting better and can have them on with five minutes effort with each stocking.

Back when my cars had points in the distributor and I had reasonable strength, even a clutch replacement was an easy weekend job. These days it's hard to take anything apart and put it back together because everything is made of plastic and unless you were on the design team, it's impossible to figure our the sequence parts were installed.

Bob's back, all is right with the world.

Thanks Geoff! Liane is making me slow down. Morning coffee in my recliner is stretching into the lunch hour so my time in the garage rarely exceeds three hours.

Well, they did hire a historian...

@Squankum, my father was a history teacher so there was no escape for me. I had history classes (nap time) in school and history lectures at home. Never thought of renting a horse, armor and a sword.

Bob, I'm a notable fraction of a century late with this idea for a joke, but did you ever tell your sons when they were young that yes, you have one arm, they have two, and maybe someday they'll have sons with three arms, that's how it works? You've got to keep little children on their toes! Well, that was my dad's philosophy.

Our children were so young they never thought of asking about my arm. In line at the grocery store checkout, our daughter pulled Liane's sleeve and pointed at the man behind her. When she said: "Mommy, that man only has one leg" Liane said: "Your father only has one arm" and Jennifer got that look -- like her brain was broken.

I tried to convince new acquaintances that it was a Coyote Ugly episode. That's when you wake up after a night of drinking with a very unattractive woman sleeping next to you. Your arm is trapped under her so rather than wake her, you chew the arm off.

Good your back Bob.

Good to be back, Aaron.

Bob, thanks for dropping by. We all will take what we can get! Thanks

Joel, I'll be back more often and for longer spells when I get the PT Cruiser back on the road.

Keep at it Bob, plenty of prayers headed your way from KS!

Thank you Marc.

Bob, all you can do is take it one day at a time. I got a bathroom project that keeps lagging behind due to something else popping up that needs imediate attention. This bathroom project was started 5 years ago.

Cody, I started my '72 Corvette project 45 years ago. I hope to get back to it in my next life.

We are all glad to see your thoughts typed out on the screen! We are all counting on you. With your thoughts and advice, it has become a better world for many of us, Bob.

Again, I am stunned that you have taken on the project of the repairs to the PT cruiser. I think of myself as a decent mechanic, but newer era cars like this, I stay away from. And apparently, from your list of defective parts, my theory may be correct. Parts are not meant to last long and break and or fail while you are working on other, more intended stuff. As mentioned in an earlier post, luckily we don't have to use that car to get to work on Monday.

I commend you on an optimistic outlook to repair the Cruiser.

Thank you Alan! It turns out the PT Cruiser's best years included the 2003-5 models. They solved the '01-02 cars' design flaws and didn't have the '06-10 models. There's a pretty dumb computer in it and that means I can change a battery without having to re-program something and there is no TPMS system in the wheels. I should have expected the plastic issues (the '87 Corvette has its share).

Glad to see you checking in, Bob!

Keep moving, its kept you young thus far!

Mike, it would be better if moving didn't hurt. At least two of my doctors are helping. My primary care prescribed Tramadol and my orthopedic surgeon prescribed Celebrex so I can make believe I don't hurt.

The best any of us can do is keep on boogieing.

I say:
To quote Bob 'Bear' Hite:
"AND DON'T FORGET TO BOOGIE!"

Canned Heat

Glad to see you back putting us who are younger, to shame, with your work ethic.

Philip, I have gone from the standing boogie to the sitting boogie.

And don't forget to keep on chooglin'!

@Squankum, among my favorite CCR tracks (yeah, I had their albums in vinyl, cassette and now CD).

P.S. That's the basic, easy joke! Extra credit if you get elaborate! If the kid asks why he isn't seeing any three-armed children, tell him that people hide them in the countryside. That's when you arrange a situation with somebody in the countryside to have a boy with a fake third arm attached to his sweatshirt, running around in the front yard as you drive by. (Cell phones would make that chance encounter much easier to coordinate with the rural residents.)

Now for some actual pranks by my dad:
1. To me and other siblings, after we had been out for a family outing, he pulled into the driveway of a small bungalow in the woods, turned to us in the back seat and said we could get out now, our real parents lived here.

I only realized a few years ago that maybe we had been whiny and petulant all day and this was his revenge. He was purely deadpan but mom was not playing along with his joke at all so our hurt and confusion was fairly minor.

2. To children in his first marriage, he shot Santa Claus. They were up late on Christmas Eve, would not go to sleep, so he climbed out a dormer window and stomped around on the roof above their bedroom and dormer window making Santa-like ho ho hos. They tried to see Santa but couldn't crane their necks enough. Then he snuck back in his window and downstairs and ran out in the yard. "YOU! HEY YOU! I DON'T CARE WHO YOU SAY YOU ARE FAT MAN, GET THOSE REINDEER OFF MY ROOF!" Then, the shotgun blasts. This, of course, convinced the boys that dad had murdered Santa Claus.

Well, our youngest child is turning 63 in a couple of months and our youngest grandchild turns 23 two days later. I have to try out some jokes on the six great grandchildren. They already pull their left arm inside their shirts and run around yelling: "I'M GRANDPA BOB!!!" over and over.

Bob, the nice thing about these modern LED underhood lights...

https://www.harborfreight.com/2000-lumen-foldable-underhood-light-70114.html

Is that they're also just portable light bars! Should you wind up in the attic on another wiring job, for example. I've used mine for a variety of things, including shop photography, yard work at night. (I have the previous, non-folding version, and have no qualms about whatever it was I spent.)

Just a week or two ago, I was thinking about valve cover gaskets. "In the old days, they were made out of cork and rubber! And they weren't so great, but we had to remove our valve cover anyway to check our valve clearances! Or we had an engine in our car that was evolved from a previously-adjustable valvetrain but now had hydraulic lash followers but still had that cork rubber valve cover gasket but that was okay, they were so easy to change! Nowadays, they last ten years, but you still dread getting to them."

I have a huge collection of portable lights and strap-on headlights. I considered getting the Harbor Freight light bar but it would have involved leaving the house. I had upgraded the lighting over the workbench and had no place to put the 12" fluorescent [converted to LED] under cabinet light. A scrap of furring, a piece of picture hanging wire and a couple of screw eyes and I have a Rube Goldberg version. I put shop lights up in the attic [home for the AC Air Handler] so I have wired solutions everywhere.

I replaced the PT Cruiser valve cover gasket years ago so I was surprised the o-rings at the base of the spark plug tubes were leaking. Turns out you may be right about the 10-year life expectancy.

You’re still slugging, but I didn’t expect anything less. It appears you appreciate your PT Cruiser as you’re doing your own repairs. My wife’s daily driver is a 03 Montana, I use the daily part sparingly as it is fairly low mileage for its age. But one day it will likely just give up.
It is good to have a project or two, but you already know this as it seems you’re always up to something. Have a great summer and will catch up with you later.
Oh ya @Squankum you are truly a maniac. Keeping doing you.

Emil, our PT Cruiser build date is July 28, 2003 so we're in good company. Just passed 50,000 miles a few weeks ago.

Nicely done, my friend... I know that I missed out on a lot on that trip. Especially Yellowstone. We didn't do any amount of hiking, or anything like it, especially going further than a couple hundred feet from our car. Yellowstone is huge, in my mind. I'd like to do better, give it the justice it deserves. Same with South Dakota Badlands, where I only saw that in the moonlight, at about midnight, from the back seat of a moving car.... We could've done so much better, had we stopped for the night, found another $20 per night motel, whether it had a kitchenette or not. Mom had plenty of bread and Spam with, we could've done something with that. To this day, Spam is still my sandwich of choice. Don't heat Spam on a bbq, or anything. Just fresh out of the can. I've never even wanted to try Spam any other way, I actually refuse to try it any other way. Mom always had bacon and eggs on that trip. If we didn't stay in a motel with a kitchenette, we'd get going down the road until we could find a rest area. Mom had a Coleman white gas cooking stove. She'd cook breakfast for all of us, clean her pans up in the rest area bathroom, and away we went. What a cool trip. A chance of a lifetime. It's something Dad was not famous for... Taking us on a trip like that. Dad was a lot like me. A ******** hermit. Or, more properly, I was just like my Dad. More than I'd like to admit. I never took my son on a trip of a lifetime like that... But we had plenty of chances to take him on a trip through our work, Cheryl and I, so Travis got around to a few places. California, Detroit (Ford Museum and Greenfield Village) through my work.

Rick, because our trips were ten weeks long, we got to spend a fair bit of time in the National Parks. The 1955 trip included a tour of Carlsbad Caverns NP, a brief stop at the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest NP. Then it was three or four days at the Grand Canyon, a week in Los Angeles at my great aunts home. Left LA the day DisneyLand opened in Anaheim (we avoided the mob). Headed north to spend three days at Sequoia NP and a full week at Yosemite NP. Stopped at Mt. Lassen for a day hike up the mountain. Next stop was Crater Lake NP and then a quick stop at the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington. From there it was into Canada to visit Banff, Jasper and Lake Louise parks.

Because we towed a small (15') travel trailer, we avoided motels and restaurants. Because we only had a tiny ice box in the trailer, there were almost daily stops to stock up on food. At the Arizona/California border crossing, we had to park and eat all the fresh lettuce and celery mom bought in Arizona. At the Canadian border we had to stay and eat a pound of bacon before crossing into Canada. Mom was a child of the Depression so she rarely threw edible food away.

Where did Mom keep the eggs and bacon on our trip, out West?? In the styrofoam cooler, of course, in the back seat of our Caprice, between the three of us kids... Drove me nuts... Hated that squeak, for many thousand miles... But breakfast and lunch was worth it, in every case. Hated that darned cooler............

The ice box in the trailer didn't bother me except when it was my turn to carry the block of ice from the store to the trailer.

It wasn't supposed to be that way, with the styrofoam cooler, for our trip. See, Dad made his own trailer for this trip. A homemade trailer. Since we were a musical family, and once the accordions, guitars, amplifiers were loaded into the trailer, and then Mom started loading cardboard boxes filled with cans of soup and things, Dad's trailer was kind of on its knees, with all of the weight involved. Dad had to add a couple more leaves to the springs to make this work. So we had a late start. I spent all of my much anticipated small change in my piggy bank at the first stop on our trip, at Paul Bunyan, in Minnesota!! There goes my money for the rest of the two week trip... But it sure was a fun trip. I guess we're not really accomplished world travelers, but we all made things work.

We didn't have any musical instruments but I was allowed to bring my fishing gear. Like Lucille Ball in the movie, The Long Long Trailer, I collected [small] rocks at all our National Park stops. I also brought home a huge Sugar Pine cone.

Ha! My best friend's family went on a cross-country road trip when his dad was reassigned to a new job. They crossed the USA, and went through Yellowstone, in dad's new Thunderbird. My friend has told me of his frustration, parents saying "Look at that, kids!" and their struggling to see anything through those damned opera windows.



Oh, looky! Wikipedia has just the picture:



Luckily, he has been back since as an adult. I confess that my east coast brain, even though a fairly outdoorsy fellow, had been conflating Yellowstone and Yosemite my whole life until Ms. Squankum decided to drag me there.

My parents took us lots of places and I can't complain, but they didn't like things they considered "touristy." Which can be dumb. Some things are popular because they're awesome!

@Squankum, my brother and I were lucky to have decent size windows in the rear of the Olds. The windows on the front of the trailer became less useful as we visited "touristy" places. At each state border and park we found decals that got stuck on those windows. Kinda defeated the purpose of the windows.

Oh, it really is big! The early history of the park involved stagecoach travel, which was slow, hard to cover 20 miles in a day, with more hotels inside the park to accomodate that pace. It was a many-day effort to take the stagecoach tour through throughout the interior of the park. Automobiles revolutionized the experience, attendance soared, and stagecoaches were over soon after:

Yellowstone Park Transportation C. | Geyserbob.com

The Yellowstone Park Transportation Co. operated stagecoach lines in Yellowstone from 1892 to 1916. They operated out of the northern entrance, using the Northern Pacific RR depot at Cinnabar, and the Gardiner. They were an all-important element of transportation in Yellowstone's varied history.

www.geyserbob.com

(Geyser Bob's website is loaded with park history.)



You can see a whole lot just by driving around the park, getting out and looking from parking areas or paved walkways! No doubt. There is so much to see just that way.

But if you walk half a mile down a hiking trail, it's like you're alone and you sometimes get an entirely different view of it all. There are busy places (Old Faithful) and very quiet, remote places.

Our second Lower 48 trip in 1956 included the National Parks on the east side of the Rockies, That included Las Vegas (where I traded dollar bills for silver dollars), Bryce and Zion, Sallt Lake City (including swimming in the Great Salt Like and an event at the Mormon Tabernacle but no Bonneville Flats). Week and a half at Yellowstone NP, several days at Glacier NP, two days at Wind Cave NP and a day at Mt. Rushmore. Seventy years later, I still have vivid memories of those trips.

 

[Grizz1963]

@Squankum and @Bob Heine the rear window comments made me smile.

My dad made the mistake of allowing 9 year old me and my 8 year old brother to “choose” his new family car in 1972
He loved two door cars, coupè shapes.
Sporty styles.
We hated the two door V4 Ford Corsair he loved, that my mum managed to put a bulled in the bonnet one night hunting rabbits while on holiday. The pic is green, theirs was midnight blue.

We hated not having our own doors to get in and out of and pop out glass, rather than wind down windows.

He wanted a Datsun 1200 GX Coupè
We wanted doors…..

He kept his “promise”

We got doors.

He also never forgot or forgave us.

But a man of his word 🩷

 

[Squankum]

Yep, that's doors! Plural, two of 'em?

Was the Datsun reliable?

The only Ford V-4 stateside was the Saab Sonnet, a small fiberglass-bodied sports car.

 

[Grizz1963]

Yep, that's doors! Plural, two of 'em?

Was the Datsun reliable?

The only Ford V-4 stateside was the Saab Sonnet, a small fiberglass-bodied sports car.

Datsun was Japanese.

Of course it was faultless.

And stupidly economical.

The 1200cc engine with probably altered carburetor to earn the GX label was revolutionary for my dad.

He had grown up on cars that demanded real men not people worried about fuel economy.

I suspect the V4 was the same engine.

I don’t know why, but I think it was less reliable.

But we got doors with wind down glass.

 

[jbmatth]

I had to look up the Saab Sonett, the second generation was a very cool looking car and they are priced reasonably for driver quality cars. I may have to add that to my list of cars to watch on BaT.

JB

 

[gearhead1960]

The V4 was a Ford engine used by Saab in the Sonnett and 95/96 models. The 95 was extremely successful in Rallying.

 

[Tommo3]

The V4 was a Ford engine used by Saab in the Sonnett and 95/96 models. The 95 was extremely successful in Rallying.

Used in the UK in Corsairs and Mk 1 Transits came in 1700 or 2000cc bad rep for oil pump failure I think or possibly water pump
very unpopular for that reason. Just checked my 10 year old self was wrong they destroyed balance shafts and fiber timing gears and thats why they were unpopular!

 

[scooterbum46]

Bob: Speaking of your TP Cruiser -

 

[Squankum]

I have a huge collection of portable lights and strap-on headlights. I considered getting the Harbor Freight light bar but it would have involved leaving the house. I had upgraded the lighting over the workbench and had no place to put the 12" fluorescent [converted to LED] under cabinet light. A scrap of furring, a piece of picture hanging wire and a couple of screw eyes and I have a Rube Goldberg version.

Oh, scrap of furring strip? Then I approve! You can do so many things with this least amount of wood.

 

[y'sguy]

This is still one of my favorites!